survival Simon ascertained that John Kennet and Ralph Windlay had been the joint occupants of the rear ground- floor flat on the right.
He went through the cheerless dilapidated hall and raised his hand to knock on the indicated door. And in that position he stopped, with his knuckles poised, for the door was already ajar.
The Saint scarcely paused before he pushed it open with his foot and went in.
'Hullo there,' he called; but there was no answer. It did not take him any time to discover why. He had come through into the one all-purpose room of which the habitable part of the flat was composed; and when he saw what was in it he knew that his fear had been justified, that he had indeed wasted too much time. Ralph Windlay was already dead.
3
A bullet fired at close range had helped to shorten his life, and had done it without making a great deal of mess. He lay flat on his back hardly a yard inside the doorway, with his arms spread wide and his mouth stupidly open. Lady Valerie's description of him was quite recognizable. He still wore his glasses. He couldn't have been much more than twenty-five, and his pale thin face looked as if it might once have been intellectual. The only mark on it was a black-rimmed hole between the eyes; but his head lay in the middle of a sticky dark red mess on the threadbare carpet, and Simon knew that the back of his skull would not be nice for a squeamish person to look at.
The room had been ransacked. The two divans had been ripped to pieces and the upholstery of the chairs had been cut open. Cupboards were open and drawers had been pulled out and left where they fell. A shabby old rolltop desk in one corner looked as if a crowbar had been used on it. The table and the floor were strewn with papers.
Simon saw that much; and then there was a sound of tramping footsteps in the hall. Automatically he pushed the door to behind him, subconsciously thinking that it would only be some other occupants of the building passing through; his brain was too busy with what he was looking at to think very hard. Before he realized his mistake the footsteps were right behind him and he was seized roughly from behind.
He whirled round with his muscles instantly awake and one fist driving out instinctively as he turned. And then, with some superhuman effort, he checked the blow in mid-flight.
In that delirious instant his brain reversed itself with such fantastic speed that everything else seemed to have a nightmare slowness by comparison. He watched the trajectory of his hand as if from a vast distance; and it was exactly like sitting in a car with catastrophe leaping up ahead, with the brakes already jammed on to the limit and nothing left to do but to hold on and hope that they would do their work in time. And with a kind of hysterical relief he saw his zooming fist slow up and stop a bare inch from the round red face of the man who had grabbed him. For another split second he simply stood blankly staring; and then suddenly he went weak with laughter.
'You shouldn't give me these shocks, Claud,' he said. 'My nerves aren't what they used to be.'
The man on the other side of his fist went on gaping at him, with his baby-blue eyes dilating with a ferment of emotions which whole volumes might be written to describe. And a tinge of royal purple crept into his plump, cherubic visage.
The reasons for that regal hue were only distantly connected with the onrush of that pile?driving fist which had been so miraculously held back from its mark. To Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, a man who had never set any exaggerated value on his beauty, a punch on the nose would only have been a more or less unpleasant incident to be endured with fortitude in the execution of his duty, and in that stoical spirit he had in his younger days suffered more drastic forms of assault and battery than that. A punch on the nose, indeed, would have been almost a joyous and desirable experience compared with the spasm of unmitigated woe that speared through Mr Teal's cosmogony when he saw the face of the Saint. It was a pang that summed up, in one poignant instant, all the years through which Chief Inspector Teal had fought his hopelessly losing battle with that elusive buccaneer, all the disappoint ments and disasters and infuriating bafflements, all the wrath and sarcasm that his efforts had brought down upon him from his superiors, all the impudent mockeries of the Saint himself, the Saint's disrespectful forefinger prodding the rotundity of his stomach and
